


For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Slim Shady (NoraPenblood)



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, I'll be adding warnings and characters with new chapters, Mentions of Unreality, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 10:16:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7930888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoraPenblood/pseuds/Slim%20Shady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Doomstar. Everyone's coming to terms with the previous events, and the way the world has changed around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Whom the Bell Tolls

**Author's Note:**

> _No man is an island,_  
>  _Entire of itself._  
>  _Each is a piece of the continent,_  
>  _A part of the main._  
>  _If a clod be washed away by the sea,_  
>  _Europe is the less._  
>  _As well as if a promontory were._  
>  _As well as if a manor of thine own_  
>  _Or of thine friend's were._  
>  _Each man's death diminishes me,_  
>  _For I am involved in mankind._  
>  _Therefore, send not to know_  
>  _For whom the bell tolls,_  
>  _It tolls for thee._  
>  -John Donne

The whole of Mordhaus hadn’t been this quiet in a very, very long time, if ever. It was as if everything had stopped, the great clock grinding to a halt as its masters lay in their beds – alone, but awake. 

Toki didn’t want to be alone. 

In truth, none of them were particularly eager to leave him by himself, but it was hard to tell exactly what the kid needed – he was apparently recovered from his more fatal wounds, all that was left of the injuries being a fairly neat line of stitches up his side (redone a few times by the Mordhaus ER doctors, who were jarred by the fact that it wasn’t infected. It was like his body had been remade. The band assumed it was the weird glowy god shit, but none of them mentioned it. They told the doctors that he’d been half dead when they’d found him, but that was that.) so when he slunk off to his bedroom, watery-eyed and silent as a statue, they’d let him go. 

His head hurt. His body didn’t, and that was weird, too weird. He sort of wanted the pain back because the pain had been what was keeping him alive back there, back in that dungeon. Pain had let him remember he was alive so many times in his life, and here it was, gone, gone in a flash of red light. Maybe he had died? Maybe he’d died and this was supposed to be heaven. He was with his friends, right? They’d saved him, sure. 

…Maybe it was just a dream, though. Just another dream that Abigail had gently coaxed him into – a made-up place where his friends saved his life and his body didn’t hurt, and his stomach wasn’t aching from being empty for weeks. He couldn’t stand to keep his eyes closed, the doubt seemed to swell up in his chest faster if he couldn’t see, accompanied by vivid flashbacks to what had happened in that basement. What Magnus had done to him, to Abigail. 

The bed was too-soft, made his skin hurt. It was too much for him, like he couldn’t handle the contact, felt like touching a raw nerve. Everything felt weird, felt too much and not enough. He tried to assuage his discomfort by kicking all the blankets off his bed but it didn’t help, didn’t do anything but make him cold, make him shiver. He let out an exasperated noise, sitting up in bed and knitting his hands together, picking at the callouses on his fingers. “Ams not real.” He muttered, getting to his feet. Maybe a bath would be good? He hadn’t had a bath in so long…

The knobs were hard to turn with how his hands were shaking, and the sound of the water hitting the tiles nearly scared him out of his skin. Jumpy. What a baby. He scowled into the spray, irritated with himself. Why was he still so upset? He was always such a baby about things. Such a pussy. 

“Fuck. Ow.” He said, voice coming out quieter than he’d intended. He’d bloodied his knuckles against the wall, not even realizing he’d done it. The impact of his fist and the tile had been loud enough to hear down the hall, but any nearby Klokateers were still wary of disturbing him. He brought the hand up to his face, ran the pad of one finger over the new little scrapes. Not too bad, probably something that’d bruise, but the sting was sort of… nice. Sort of grounding. 

That was dangerous territory and he knew it, but he still wasn’t thinking clearly. Everything was foggy, every shadow or noise made him jump. He expected Magnus to come in at any moment, to be there with a knife or a chain or a needle or something worse. To whisper those poisonous, backwards words, to say his friends had left him, that Toki should be _thankful._

Mindlessly, he peeled off his clothes. They were clean ones that had been given to him, but they were practically ruined now, given how dirty he was when he put them on. They’d sort of sponged him down in the doctor’s office, but he still felt greasy. Still had grime under his nails, had that sticky, disgusting feeling coating his skin. He wished he could take it all off, drop it in a washing machine or something. 

The mirror was there, hard to avoid, and he winced when he caught himself in it. Scrawny, clearly malnourished, littered with faint, yellow bruises that had been much darker only a day before. The only signs of his struggle were those fading marks and the clean looking bandage pasted to his side. He picked at it immediately, tugged it off of himself without so much as a whine. The stitches looked clean too, the skin beneath them only slightly red, not leaking with pus and slime like it had been before.  


Had any of it been real? How was he to be sure, when his injuries appeared so minor? When he was practically healed but it had been less than 24 hours since he’d last been kicked in the ribs? He was trembling now, fingers shaking almost violently, his teeth chattering a little. It was hard to tear his eyes away from the man in the mirror – skinny, skinnier than usual, perhaps a little beaten up but not enough, not enough to really be evidence. Not enough to show what he’d suffered, what Magnus had done, what he’d allowed to happen to himself. “Ams not real…” He whispered again, quiet, like a prayer.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It wasn’t easy to sleep – not as easy as it should’ve been given how exhausted he was. Nathan couldn’t stop thinking, couldn’t stop his mind wandering to the state of his bandmate (brother now, right?) in the other room. Was he doing okay? Was he asleep? The kid deserved a good night’s rest. Part of him wanted to go and check on him, but like, would that be crossing a boundary? Would Toki even want company?

They really hadn’t spoken – the concert had been immediate, urgent, and there was no room for smalltalk or apology. Getting home had been an awkward, silent trip with no Charles there and none of the boys particularly eager to start a conversation they didn’t know how to have. Pickles had been knocking back booze like it was the last liquid on earth, apparently trying to drive himself into a blackout. 

They couldn’t look at each other. That was kind of fucked up, wasn’t it? They’d all been together there, they’d all seemed so close at the end, but when they were really left alone to think it was sort of too much. Not intimate, exactly, but like they all knew some secret that was still too raw and uncomfortable to bring up. They sat in silence, eyes focused on their own laps, on the TV, out the window, and tried their very best not to think. 

Now they were separate, though – now Nathan really was alone with his thoughts. The sound of the ocean was pumping through his speakers in an attempt at lulling him to sleep, but it felt like even the ghostly voices under the waves were mute tonight. He couldn’t stop thinking about that room, about the state of Abigail and Toki when they’d found them. It made him feel shit he wasn’t particularly used to feeling. Guilt, fear, anger – well, at least anger was kind of normal, but this was different.

This was the kind of anger that he could never get out of his system because Magnus was fucking dead, and there was nobody else to blame but himself. He’d wasted time, he’d wasted time partying, compartmentalizing, pushing the thoughts into the back of his head. And what if he had done that for a little while longer? What if he’d drank himself to oblivion, let himself dissociate away from the issue for a few days more, then what? Then Toki and Abigail would’ve likely died. They would’ve rotted down there in that basement, knowing that nobody in that band had given a single fuck about them. Toki would’ve died knowing that the rhetoric of nobody loving him had been true, that his friends didn’t care, that he had deserved to die like a dog. Nathan wasn’t sure he would’ve ever been able to forgive himself.

And then there was Abigail, right? Abigail who had been confusing and beautiful and maybe he’d just been desperate to get off, maybe he’d gotten clingy and feverish and let his dick do the talking, but it was clear now that he’d made a fair amount of mistakes. She hadn’t even looked at him when they’d gone to get her – made a point of letting Skwisgaar lift her out of the dirt. But then, Nathan hadn’t tried either, had he? She wasn’t even on his mind at that point – it had all been Toki, his brother, his best friend, his bandmate. The kid he’d been overprotective of since day one. It wasn’t really a decent excuse for practically forgetting the girl he’d supposedly been in love with, but it was the way it had gone. 

She’d left them almost immediately – refused to be treated in Mordhaus, refused to even sit anywhere near Nathan. There was a kind of dull, disappointed anger in her eyes, and he wondered if he deserved it. It took a lot to actually show him he’d done something wrong, and he really didn’t know how to handle it. Was he supposed to apologize? Would she like that? It didn’t seem like she was all that eager to be involved with him at all, but he felt. Weird. He felt guilty. He’d never really had someone look at him like that – like they really, really hated him. Not someone he kind of liked, anyway.

Sitting there and stewing in all these weird, stupid feelings had him antsy, had him fidgeting a little under his blanket. He turned over on his side, stared out over the immense plateau that was his bed, into the blackness against the other wall. Maybe he should go check on Toki. Just, like, make sure he didn’t need anything. Make sure he was sleeping okay. It occurred to him that Charles was gone (something that filled him with the briefest flash of cold panic – what would they do without him? They’d had someone watching their asses since day one and it had been so long, would he even know how to sustain himself? What if nobody was watching Toki and he got hurt? What if something happened?) and that sudden flurry of paranoia was enough to have him kicking off his sheets and climbing off the bed. 

He wasn’t dressed in anything but his underwear as he stumbled out into the hall, clumsily brushing the greasy strands of his hair back over his head, out of his face. Toki’s room wasn’t too far, he didn’t need to run, nothing that serious was going on. It was hard to keep calm though, considering the state the guy had been in when they first found him. He’d had the image seared into the back of his brain all night and he just needed to quell his anxiety. A wayward Klokateer almost got knocked over, quickly scrambling back against the wall and out of Nathan’s path with a stuttered, “Sorry, Sire.” 

Everything was probably fine. Toki was probably in bed, snoring away. He knocked on his door as soon as he got to it, chewing mindlessly on the inside of his cheek. Something stirred down the hall and he turned his head to look, catching the slightest glimpse of someone stepping around the corner. Huh. Maybe just another Klokateer, or one of the other band members stepping out to get a snack. Whatever. “Toki? Uh. Uh, hey… Hey. Toki. Are you awake?” He was trying to whisper and not doing a great job, his voice echoing in the too-empty hallway. When there was no answer he swallowed hard, wrapped a big sweaty hand around the doorknob, and pushed his way inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! If you liked this, my blog is striderfvcker.tumblr.com
> 
> My SFW ao3 account is http://archiveofourown.org/users/striderfvcker/pseuds/striderfvcker


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